Memory Hog Hair?!?
Choppski
Posts: 627
Let's just say I am happy that I got a good deal on the Thomas Pro Bundle, because if I had bought items separately, one hair item would be going back. Not because it doesn't look good--it does. But that hair more than quadrupled the memory usage. When a single hair prop takes more memory than having a huge set in place it means it's only useful for portraits. Grateful for the vendors who recognize that even the greatest looking hair becomes useless when it's a huge memory hog.
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So which one is it? Save the rest of us from wasting money on it.
I seem to recall a fairly recent thread about low-memory hairs that still looked great in renders.
Ah! Here it is.
It's the Mathis hair. Without the hair, when I render with just Thomas my task manager shows like 5000 MB of memory being used and with everything else on my computer, it's at 42 percent memory. When I added the hair and rendered the memory shot up to 19000mb and my memory usage was at 90 percent. The same thing happened with Dforce pitbull hair and some of the hair for Harlow. I have lots of hair I can use that is low on memory and omni shader helps, but come on, a single hair that increases memory usage that much is an issue.
I cant help with the Matthis hair, but I can probably help with the Pitbull. The biggest thing is changing that line tesselation to 0. You can do this yourself or the Revolution set I have in the store has a preset that can change that for you, which will reduce the hair weight significantly.
Wasn't there a similar high memory usage problem recently, with another hair using Omnihair shader and the solution was making sure the value of Render Line Tessellation Sides was 0 (it should be 0 with the Omnihair shader as far as I remember advices given when this new shader was released).
Strand hairs that were released before the omnishader will 100% have a higher tesselation. So they are extremely heavy.
A few strand hairs have recently come through with a line tesselation of 1 which wont do much for weight, but will most likely affect the shader in not so pretty ways. Others have come through super heavy because they are importing lines at 100%. Thats the vendors perogative and theres not much you can do to reduce the weight on those. The easiest way to know if thats what is going on, is to to look at a few surfaces and check the PS Hairs and the PR Hairs. If they read as 0 on all the sections, they are importing at 100%.
Sorry if I am being dense here, but is pitbull strandbased?
Yes and it is a rather old one, so it will definitely benefit from the new shader.
Thank you. You just made pitbull usable. Maybe other hairs too.
I would say that I am sorry i griped, but I'm not!
You are very welcome! I'm glad I could help :)
How silly I feel. I didn't even realize pitbull was your hair.
I also used your tool to set tessaltion to 0 on Matthis hair and it made a HUGE difference.
It's all good, Im glad it made these so much more usable for you :) And its good top know that the Matthis hair must have had the tesselation set high. Should file a ticket and just let them know, considering its a new release and listed as using the Omni shader.
Ok, I will do that.
BTW, is there info anywhere to get some guidance on using the settings like bias, gain, hair dye and melanin? I generally get gloss and roughness, and I think I understand tips (i.e., the tips of the hair as opposed to the roots). Your presets are great, but I would like to know better what to do. Is there a tutorial somewhere in the forums?
There isnt as of yet. Ive been trying to write a new thread for all the dhair stuff, but I just havent had the time. What I can do for now is link you to the nvidia shader page. You will have to scroll down to find the hair shader - and there are a few things that dont work with these hairs ( like emission). So take it all with a grain of salt.
https://docs.omniverse.nvidia.com/materials-and-rendering/latest/materials.html
Ok, thank you. I am accustomed to playing with shaders, so I can also keep doing that.
Don't buy Hair Studio hair products if you don't like memory hog products or Omni Hair products setup with the wrong line tessellation. The recent Mischief Maker hair has about 11 million vertices and is setup with line tessellation 1 instead of 0. It looks terrible that way and is nearly unusable. You can change the line tessellation to 0 to make it look much nicer, but you can't overcome the number of vertices in the strands. There is a discussion in the thread about appreciating new releases.
I have that hair but haven't tried it. Again, it was in a bundle and I doubt I will use it. But it's good to know that I am not alone in finding this issue.
I bought it separately (not bundled) and promptly returned it.
oh I found a chonker in the new Outlet additions
https://www.daz3d.com/mrl-dforce-long-morphing-hair-for-genesis-8-females
I don't think it was particulary slow to simulate or render
but
saving the scene took over 2 hours
trying again just the hair as a scene subset and still waiting...
How large is the scene files?
whole scene 17.1GB I kid you not
still trying to save the hair by itself
the rest as you can see not big
I will point out it is a 360 frame animation, those files are big but not THAT big, my biggest to date was 5.63GB, most are under 1GB (only 3 out of 1318 scenes so far on this PC over 1GB and that includes big sets etc)
update, hair sim animation alone finally saved 16.8GB
285,793 vertices - each of which has a psotion stored at each key frame after simulation. That is a lot of data.
strangely it's rendering quite fast, am trying to render a few different camera angles as unsure if I can load it again considering the size of the file
I did apply the new omnihair shader
I take that back, my render it seems to have lost it's simulation
It isn't strand-based, is it? Looks like polygon/dForce cloth hair.
it's strandbased but I think applying the omnishader preset I saved destroyed the simulation
(yes checked, simulation is ticked by default saving a shader
)
still a huge save though
Ah, I had the scalp selected rather than the hair.
That was the total for the scene, I had loaded the hair on its own.
When the hair loads it has a tesselation sides setting of 3, so will not be using iray curves. If you set this to 0, will it help?
On a dForce hair I believe the number of lines is the important number, and on this hair there are 6K lines, which is about normal.